Prepaid phone cards offered by telecommunication service providers are widely popular in today's environment. Such cards have a predetermined amount of time in terms of minutes credited thereto and a consumer who purchases the card may apply the credited minutes against the time spent during telephone calls. When the allotted time is spent, the card may be thrown away or, in some cases, may be recharged with additional minutes.
Typically, printed on the prepaid phone card is a telephone number for accessing a phone card service and a personal identification number (PIN) assigned to that particular phone card. Generally, a prepaid phone card user must first dial the access number, then input the PIN number and then input the telephone number of a desired party to place a telephone call to that party. Once the telephone call is connected, the time spent during the call is deducted from the phone card.
One drawback with conventional prepaid phone cards is the large amount of numbers that must be manually input by the caller in order to place a call. For example, the caller must first manually input the access number, which is typically a toll-free “800” type number having a sequence of eleven numbers. The caller then inputs the PIN number, which typically can be another sequence of ten or more numbers, and then the caller dials the number of the desired party, which can be another sequence of eleven numbers. Aside from the time it takes to input all these numbers, if a mistake is made, the caller must start again from the beginning.
Many existing telephony products today offer the ability to enter a short “voice label” code or alias that is translated into a complete destination number when the customer places a call. However, it has been heretofore unknown to provide speech recognition capabilities to phone card users or to provide speech recognition applications with respect to verification of PIN numbers.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to relieve the consumer of one or more of the several layers of dialing to connect to a called party, thereby giving some relief to initiating a prepaid card phone call. It would be further desirable to provide speech recognition along with prepaid phone card telecommunication services to create a faster, more efficient, yet more user-friendly consumer calling experience through voice activated dialing features.